By Amanda Dunn

"How do you know she's the queen?" asks kindergarten teacher Gracie Pupillo. "Because she has a crown and she's a girl," replies Felix. Case closed.

Felix and Riha, both 4, learn while they read with Gracie Pupillo at Flemington Street Children's Centre.Credit:Jason South

Ms Pupillo is reading Pamela Allen's book A Lion in the Night with Felix and Riha, both four, while the rest of the kindergarten's children play outside. It is part of the "intentional teaching" strategy at Flemington Street Children's Centre, which educators employ with all children in childcare and kindergarten, and is outlined in the federal government's early years learning framework. It means that Ms Pupillo can focus on just one or two children at a time, working with them in a way that suits their needs.

But according to a large longitudinal study of 2500 preschool children in Victoria and Queensland, there's not enough intentional teaching happening in early learning centres, and the gap between children at the top and bottom of the academic scale by the time they reach prep is growing wider. Collette Tayler, lead researcher on the E4Kids study and professor of early childhood education and care at Melbourne University, said the shift away from solely play-based learning to a more deliberate style of teaching within play - one that eschews rote learning and instead gives depth and context to everyday ideas - was vital to children's development. But it was not being employed widely enough.

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"Children who experience, inside of play settings, more instructional support for developing their concepts, their understandings and their language, tend to do better," Professor Tayler said. "There's been a strong recognition of the importance of play in socialisation and social development, and that will continue to be the case. But children also need to build their concepts and their understanding, particularly in the multilingual community that is Victoria."

At Flemington Street, this kind of teaching happens in both a planned and spontaneous way. Individual reading time, which is planned, is mixed with "conversational learning" that might happen, for example, during a nappy change.

Ms Pupillo said it was important not just to tell the child what was happening, but to give them a context for the words they were hearing. So while dressing a child the educator might say: "To put our shoes on, we need to put our socks on first. How do we put our socks on?"

Centre co-ordinator Emily White said the centre had long had a play-based approach, but since the states agreed on the early years learning framework in 2009, intentional teaching has been embedded within it. She believed it had benefited the educators as well as the children, because it has made them think more carefully about what they teach.

"The biggest thing I learned was, even with an infant, allowing them time to respond," she said. Ms Pupillo said she had also noticed children's language and social skills developing more quickly.

Intentional teaching is a relatively new idea that is yet to really take hold, Professor Tayler said. But it was particularly important for those children at the lower end of the academic scale, as her study showed the disparities between children's abilities had set in by three years of age, and did not change by the time they reached prep.

The E4Kids study would continue to track the children through their primary schooling, but she believed that gap was unlikely to close: "If children start at a low level it's very difficult for them to pick up ground."

She said parents could also use intentional teaching techniques, which are based on explaining the "why" and "how" of everyday things. "It means having a conversation, and it means going back and forth and actually listening to very young children, rather than simply telling them."